Category: Lists

List with No Name #16

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  1. Heaven’s Gate
  2. John Carter from Mars
  3. My Blueberry Nights
  4. The Box
  5. Dune
  6. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
  7. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen 
  8. Popeye
  9. Krull
  10. Nothing But Trouble
  11. Showgirls

List with No Name #15

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  1. Joseph Cornell’s boxes.
  2. Much of J.G. Ballard, especially the stuff in the ’70s and ’80s.
  3. The Residents.
  4. The films of the Brothers Quay.
  5. Charles Burns’s stuff.
  6. Wm. Burroughs, or the idea of Wm. Burroughs.
  7. Joseph Beuys and his goddamn fat and felt.

List with No Name #14

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  1. Eudora Welty
  2. Zora Neale Hurston
  3. Flannery O’Connor
  4. Carson McCullers
  5. Kate Chopin
  6. Lillian Smith
  7. Katherine Anne Porter
  8. Shirley Ann Grau
  9. Harper Lee
  10. Alice Walker
  11. Lydia Cabrera

List with No Name #12

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  1. McNulty & Bunk
  2. Carver & Herc
  3. Poot & Bodie
  4. Avon & Stringer
  5. Freamon & Bunk
  6. Kima & McNulty
  7. Freamon & Prez
  8. Rhonda & Daniels
  9. McNulty & Freamon
  10. Snoop & Chris
  11. Omar & Brother Mouzone

List with No Name #11

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  1.  The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea
  2. The Big Sleep
  3. The Way of All Flesh
  4. Woodcutters
  5. The Melancholy of Resistance
  6. Aurelia and Other Writings
  7. The Hearing Trumpet
  8. The Invention of Morel
  9. The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches
  10. Today I Wrote Nothing
  11. The Red and the Black

List with No Name #9

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  1. A Peep at Polynesian Life
  2. A Narrative of Advenures in the South Seas
  3. And a Voyage Thither
  4. His First Voyage
  5. The World in a Man-of-War
  6. The Whale
  7. The Ambiguities
  8. His Fifty Years of Exile
  9. His Masquerade
  10. An Inside Narrative

List with No Name #8

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  1. Robert Walser
  2. Franz Kafka
  3. Henry Miller
  4. Thomas Bernhard
  5. David Markson
  6. Renata Adler
  7. W.G. Sebald
  8. Lydia Davis
  9. Ben Marcus

 

List with No Name #7

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  1. Orchard House
  2. 334 East 11th St.
  3. Hoeller’s garret
  4. 7 Eccles St.
  5. Bag End, Bagshot Row
  6. 4 Privet Dr.
  7. Thornfield Hall
  8. 221B Baker St.
  9. Interzone

List with No Name #6

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  1. “Listening to the same programme, she also learned that the only animal that doesn’t crossbreed with its own offspring, is the horse.”
  2. “Somebody went there to die, I believe, in one of the old stories. Paris, perhaps. I mean the Paris who had been Helen’s lover, naturally. And who was wounded quite near the end of that war.”
  3. “With nought a wired from the wordless either.”
  4. “Hack away you mean red nigger, he said, and the old man raised the axe and split the head of John Joel Glanton to the thrapple.”
  5. “I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.”

List with No Name #5

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  1. Black Beauty
  2. Flicka
  3. Strawberry/Fledge
  4. Gunpowder
  5. Silver
  6. Hwin
  7. Banner
  8. Shadowfax
  9. Alfonso
  10. Fru-Fru
  11. Atrax
  12. Boxer
  13. Mollie
  14. Clover
  15. Stranger

List with No Name #4

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  1. A Tale of Two Cities
  2. Robinson Crusoe
  3. The Iliad
  4. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
  5. Tender Is the Night
  6. Catch-22
  7. Native Son

List with No Name #3

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  1. Don Quixote & Sancho Panza
  2. Tom & Huck
  3. Huck & Jim
  4. Candide & Pangloss
  5. Stephen Dedalus & Leopold Bloom
  6. Hal Incandenza & Mario Incandenza
  7. Hal Incandenza & Michael Pemulis
  8. Mason & Dixon
  9. Arturo Belano & Ulisses Lima
  10. Prince Hal & Falstaff
  11. Frodo Baggins & Sam Gamgee
  12. Bast & JR
  13. The kid & Toadvine
  14. Romeo & Mercutio
  15. Ishmael & Queequeg
  16. George Milton & Lennie Small
  17. Raoul Duke & Dr. Gonzo

List with No Name #2

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  1. The first 20 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey
  2. The last 10 minutes of if . . . .
  3. The first half of Barry Lyndon but not the second half
  4. Every minute of Days of Heaven
  5. Every minute of Russian Ark
  6. The opening sequence of Ponyo
  7. The last five minutes of Aguirre, the Wrath of God
  8. The closing titles sequence of INLAND EMPIRE

List with No Name #1

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  1. Bleak House
  2. A Frolic of His Own
  3. Babbitt
  4. Fathers and Sons
  5. The Magic Mountain
  6. Middlemarch
  7. Moll Flanders
  8. The Tin Drum
  9. Life and Fate
  10. R.U.R.
  11. The Dwarf
  12. Zeno’s Conscience

Caged Bedouins, Uruguayan Cannibals, Mr. Max Tundra, Absent Adventurer Anniversary, and a Few Morsels of Hurricane Lit

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Attention:

1. Friends of the ‘klept have embarked on a new culinary adventure. Read all about it at brand new blog Confined Nomad. Their mission:

The goal of this journey is to find cuisines from every United Nations member state, within New York City limits, in alphabetical order. We realize that there are a few flaws to this logic, and will make every attempt to handle these wisely when we reach a questionable issue. For instance, cuisines are not defined by the UN. There are regional specialties, there are countries not internationally recognized, there are border disputes, and new countries are being formed all the time . . . This blog will serve as documentation of the adventure, in which we will do our best to describe not only the food we eat, but also things we learn about its nation of origin, culture, and the immigrant communities here in New York City. We hope this will be much more than a food blog.

The virgin entries on Afghanistan and Albania are tasty fare (sorry!) and we’re looking forward to plenty more delectable treats (yikes! sorry again!).

2. We finally saw Frank Marshall’s 1993 film Alive this weekend. Alive, based on Piers Paul Read’s book of the same name, tells the true story of the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 crash of October 13, 1972, in which a Uruguayan rugby team’s chartered flight crashes in the Andes. The survivors eventually resort to cannibalizing the dead to survive (let’s see what happens when Confined Nomad gets to ‘U’ on their list). Despite plenty of strange flaws, including egregious over-acting, the film is oddly great. An intense, chest-tightening narrative that offers few moments of relief, Alive is a real-life horror movie masquerading as an adventure tale. Recommended.

3. With distinguished Englishman Max Tundra’s new album Parallax Error Beheads You ready to drop any day now (glowing review forthcoming), we thought we’d bring up the greatness of his last CD, Mastered by Guy at the Exchange. Max’s MBGATE was easily one of our favorite albums of the early aughties. Weird and tuneful and splendid and frenetic, MBGATE is a neglected classic, perhaps due to its unclassifiable sound. Max programs old Amigas, plays dozens of instruments, and sings along with his sister on a strange group of songs about Michel Gondry, delivery jobs, amino acids, the break up of Don Caballero (with Storm & Stress as consolation prize), and, uh, girls. We love it and so should you. His website is awesome, by the way.

4. Today marks the one-year anniversary of gazillionaire adventurer Steve Fossett disappearing along with his single-engine Bellanca Super Decathlon airplane. We don’t think Fossett is dead, and neither, apparently, does Chris Irvine, who speculated in the Telegraph that Fossett faked his own death. We now invite our readers, again, to speculate on the whereabouts of Mr. Fossett. Check out our Steve Fossett Fan Fiction Contest blog for all the details!

5. Down here in The Florida, we continue to have hurricane concerns. And, because this blog likes to masquerade as a a literary affair, we offer a few lines from books on the subject:

In Shakespeare’s King Lear, Act 3 scene 2, we find one of the earliest usages of the word hurricane in the English language:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s molds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!

Bit of a drama queen, Lear, what with all these apocalyptic fantasies. Speaking of drama queens, how about the opening lines of Walt Whitman’s “With Husky-haughty Lips, O Sea!”:

With husky-haughty lips, O sea!
Where day and night I wend thy surf-beat shore,
Imaging to my sense thy varied strange suggestions,
(I see and plainly list thy talk and conference here,)
Thy troops of white-maned racers racing to the goal,
Thy ample, smiling face, dash’d with the sparkling dimples of the sun,
Thy brooding scowl and murk–thy unloos’d hurricanes,
Thy unsubduedness, caprices, wilfulness

Fanciful stuff. For a less romanticized description, might we suggest the end of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, where a massive hurricane turns Lake Okeechobee into a “monstropolous beast,” a monster that floods the streets and destroys homes. Stay away, Hannah.

The Believer’s 2008 Reader Survey: (What Some Jokers Thought Were) The Best Books of 2007

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The current issue of The Believer features the results of the reader’s poll, as well as the editor’s top pick, for the best books published in 2007. The editors chose Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, which we haven’t read, and the readers picked Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, probably because the hero is such a nerd. The list follows with our comments; titles are linked to our reviews.

  1. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—Junot Díaz
  2. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union—Michael Chabon: We didn’t like this book and are frankly astounded at all the praise it’s garnered.
  3. The Savage Detectives—Roberto Bolaño: It’s in a stack waiting to be read. The stack is very big though, and the book is very big, so, who knows (in all likelihood it will beat out last year’s reader fave, Pynchon’s impossibly large Against the Day).
  4. Tree of Smoke—Denis Johnson: We loved it. Top pick of the year. Very divisive, strangely–just read through the Amazon reviews.
  5. Then We Came to the End—Joshua Ferris
  6. No One Belongs Here More Than You—Miranda July: Oh my gosh. Seriously? Really? I read half of this at a Barnes & Noble, no exaggeration. I sat and drank coffee and read it. I’m not saying that a book has to take a while to read in order to have weight or substance, but in this particular instance, no, nothing, fluff. This is the kind of thing that people who quit reading after high school mistake for literature.
  7. On Chesil Beach—Ian McEwan: The library has this on CD; I’ll listen to it this summer. I’ve grappled with the first five pages of Atonement too many times to bother, really. And then I saw the movie, and it sucked. So…
  8. Zeroville—Steve Erickson
  9. Like You’d Understand, Anyway—Jim Shepard
  10. Slam—Nick Hornby: We suspect that The Believer‘s readers are partial to Hornby; would they have given another Young Adult novel a nod? We doubt it.
  11. Divisadero—Michael Ondaatje: Also in the stack.
  12. Bowl of Cherries—Millard Kaufman: A pamphlet containing the first three chapters was published as an insert in an issue of McSweeney’s. It was pretty funny.
  13. Varieties of Disturbance—Lydia Davis
  14. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian—Sherman Alexie: This was fantastic. And it was YA! We rescind our Hornby complaint.
  15. The Abstinence Teacher—Tom Perrotta
  16. Call Me by Your Name—André Aciman
  17. After Dark—Haruki Murakami: Murakami is the writer we wished that we love but we just can’t get into. We remember reading some of his short fiction years ago, in Harper’s and other places, but even The Elephant Vanishes was a trial to get through.
  18. Darkmans—Nicola Barker
  19. Diary of a Bad Year—J. M. Coetzee
  20. Falling Man—Don DeLillo: Dry, self-important, rarely engaging, and not nearly as good as it was pretending to be, Falling Man was only a step above its dark twin, Cosmopolis. Continue reading “The Believer’s 2008 Reader Survey: (What Some Jokers Thought Were) The Best Books of 2007” →

Summer Reading List: Tales of Adventure

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Indulge yourself this summer by taking a fantastic voyage–literary or literally. To help you get started, check out the following tales of adventure.

William Vollman’s The Rifles, part of his as-yet-unfinished Seven Dreams series is a brilliant engagement of history, colonialism, identity, and all of those Big Profound Issues that we so adore in our modern literature. It’s also a really cool adventure story, the tale of John Franklin’s nineteenth-century exploration of Inuit territory. Sad, beautiful, breathtaking.

If you prefer your adventure tales uncomplicated by postmodern gambits, check out John Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, a journalistic account of the writer’s 1996 ascent of Mt. Everest, and the disasters that befell his expedition. The word “harrowing” fits well, gentle readers.

On the lighter-but-not-too-much-lighter side, Jeff Smith’s self-published comic Bone is fantastic; even better, you can get the entire 1300 page run of the whole series in Bone: One Volume Edition. We use the word “delightful” here in an absolutely unpejorative sense, friends: the adventures of Fone Bone, his cousins Phoney Bone and Smiley Bone, and Thorn, Granma Rose, and the Red Dragon are epic in scope yet retain an honest humor that will keep in the most cynical folks laughing. A major literary accomplishment that has been unjustly overlooked.

Also somewhat overlooked is Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno. In Bone, protagonist Fone Bone lugs around a massive copy of Melville’s masterpiece Moby-Dick everywhere he goes–and while that book is undoubtedly a desert island classic, Benito Cereno is an underappreciated gem of a tale. Revealing the strange secret at the heart of this book would spoil it, so suffice to say that the short novel enigmatically investigates slavery and colonialism in ways that beg for closer analysis. Good stuff.

Perhaps, though, you beg for the real thing. In that case, we recommend Ultimate Adventures (from Rough Guides) for all your camel-trekking-in-the-Sahara, rock-climbing-at-Joshua-tree, Pacuare-River-rafting needs. Beautiful photography and tantalizing descriptions are coupled with informative “Need to Know” sections that spell out the who-what-when-where-and-how that will help you get your adventure under way.

Also in the exploratory vein, Where to Go When: The Americas, from DK’s Eyewitness Travel, serves as a kind of travel almanac–the kind that makes you wish you were very, very rich with an excess of free time. If that were the case, you’d be spending nine days in May on the Amazon River, spotting pink river dolphins, gorgeous macaws, and darling squirrel monkeys instead of reading this blog right now. Even if you’re not excessively rich with nothing more pressing to do other than trek the Alaskan fjords, The Americas is fun daydreaming material–perhaps the realist response to Vollman’s Seven Dreams. In any case, Ultimate Adventures and The Americas both come out at the end of this summer, giving you plenty of time to plan that awesome adventure getaway for next year.